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Sam Harris by Zoe Young.

The painting echoes the pose of Manet’s Olympia – but the
subject is an indigenous Australian woman surrounded by European books, that
comment on the European traditions of art, and perched underneath the leg of
the day bed, holding it level, is a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
The symbolism of this was what first struck me when viewing the painting
at the Archibald prize exhibition. It is not subtle. It offers continuity with
a tradition and, at the same time, a re-contextualisation and critical comment
on it. The only analysis of the painting that I found so far identifies
the reference Manet’s work but concludes that Young's painting is shallow and
unconsidered:

It’s a likeable, albeit lightweight work, but I don’t
understand what Young is trying to tell us by putting so many books into the
picture. Does she want us to know she is a good reader? Is she suggesting
Harris is not just a pretty face? Either way, the gratuitous sprinkling of
titles acts as a distraction, not an enhancement.

The titles aren't a distraction; they offer an interpretive lens
to the entire composition. I don't think Young merely wants to show that
she is a good reader. The allusion to Manet establishes continuity, the
selection of books on European art and australiana reemphasises both continuity
and recontexualization, and a book about the social context and purpose of art
invites social comment on the traditions of art in Australia and the
representation of women in art and indigenous women in particular. How could an
art critic miss these connections?

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to el…

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of…